Hey, Suburbia! We're in love with you.

I bought a Tivo. I don’t even watch TV, but I’ve been brainwashed by suburban materialism and all its superficial counterparts. My life is full of everything I don’t want. I worked for years at a job in clothing retail (which I justify by noting that all the logo t-shirts and many of the dELiA*s brand items are made in the U.S.A. which means sweatshop free) for a store that is quickly blossoming into a corporate nightmare.

I sell things. I sold to mothers who had nothing better to do than come to the mall and shop for their spoiled teenage daughters. I told them what’s hot for the season and I sold. But I never lied. I stopped shoplifters like I cared if they took some underwear. They probably needed them more than the company needed to sell them. They have babies at 15 and the father is in jail because he hasn’t been paying the child support. Take the fucking underwear. I’ll pretend I didn’t see.

And I buy. I buy what’s hot for the season because we have to look fashionable and hip. Most of the time I don’t even wear it. I wear it once to validate my reason for buying it. Then it lays crumpled on my bedroom rug for months. Until next season’s line comes out.

We had to show the mothers what their daughters should look like. We had to have our hair done and our make-up caked and our toenails painted to match our fingers. “Don’t look like you just rolled out of bed. You are the face of dELiA*s.” For 3 years, I was the face of dELiA*s. But sometimes, I didn’t shower.

I grew up in suburbia, where the Smoking Joe’s cigarette shop always has its neon OPEN sign lit up. At 2 am when the traffic lights have switched into sensor mode and parking lots in the strip malls are empty, the neon sign still invites us in while the iron toothed gate is locked across the Plexiglas double doors. “Just leave it on,” says the lazy part of the psyche. “We’ll be open again in the morning anyway.”

One day I will live off the land. Wind energy, organic gardens, homemade bread and a hand built house. Indoor plumbing? Maybe. The woods are my backyard. Sometimes I can’t shake the feeling that I want to live comfortably. That convenience is a necessity like Starbucks and shopping carts. But mostly I can’t respect this lifestyle my generation has grown up in. I want to be in nature, learn things by doing them and not hearing about them or watching them on TV. I want to know how to cook and make and build and fix everything I will ever need. I want to be free from this bubble of highways, developments, LAND for sale realty, sensored traffic lights and neon OPEN signs we’ve built around ourselves. I want human nature to go back to being natural. Life without Tivo.